Exploring Arab Folk Literature

2
The Egyptian Mawwāl: Its Ancestry,
its Development, and its Present Forms

One of many tantalising passages in al-Bayān wa t-Tabyīn comes in the context
of the discussion of the superior eloquence of the Arabs, and proclaims the need
to examine ‘how the Arabs came to tailor measured tunes to measured verses,
combining measured with measured, whereas non-Arabs distort words–now
contracting, now stretching them–in order to fit them into the measure of the tune,
so that they combine the measured with the unmeasured’.1 Alas, the ebullient but
undisciplined author never gets round to elaborating or illustrating his statement,
and one is left with little more than an indication–scarcely surprising in an age of
tumultuous racial and cultural contacts–that a multiplicity of artistic traditions was
forcing itself on the attention of the intellectuals. Any resulting cross-fertilisation
was presumably resisted by Arab and Arabised intellectuals of al-Jāḥiẓ’s temper.
It may nevertheless have played a part in the multi-rhyme experiments ascribed
to Baššar b. Burd, Abū Nuwās and other poets of renown;2 it may account for
the appearance in Umayyad times of the mutaqārib metre, soon integrated into
‘classical’ prosody;3 it may even have played a part in the emergence of the

azal
genre in poetry.4 The role of Persians in the development of Arab singing has long
been recognised.5 To what extent the popular literature of Arabic-speaking peoples
was an amalgam of different lores and traditions can only be conjectured.

Indeed, almost every aspect of this popular literature–its early development, its
distinctive features, its extent, its local sources of inspiration, as well as its reach
across the Islamic world–must remain largely a matter of surmise. The attachment of the educated Arab to his language in its classical form has ensured that
compositions in the colloquial have seldom been recorded or described. Verse fared
even worse than prose in this respect, for whereas tales–like those of the Arabian
Nights–were sometimes preserved once the language was recast in ‘grammatical’ form, metrical compositions did not easily lend themselves to such treatment;
only now and then do they incidentally break surface in the written sources. The
author of al->A

ānī, for example, relates with manifest distaste an anecdote about
Ibrāhī al-Mawsilī (d. 188/804) which includes a couple of lines he was reputed to
have sung when in his cups;6 they conform neither with classical grammar nor with
classical scansion. Even if the story is apocryphal, it provides positive evidence
that songs in the colloquial and at variance with the classical prosodic system were
current in Iraq by the tenth century if not a good deal earlier.

Andalusian zajal is the first such form truly to emerge into the full light of literary

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